TikTok’s rise as a popular social media platform among younger consumers and content creators has implications for where and how brands and retailers should allocate their digital marketing budget. From NFTs to digital avatars, here’s how tech companies are disrupting the creator economy and influencer marketing.
TikTok, the short video social media platform owned by China-based ByteDance, is one of the top platforms for content creators today, with more than 3.5B all-time downloads worldwide.
The creator economy is growing and evolving rapidly, with new platforms and content types continuously emerging. Content creators (such as influencers) and the platforms where they build their followings represent a significant portion of consumers’ online behavior, including who they listen to when it comes to buying decisions — as well as, increasingly, where they are making direct purchases.
The future of the creator economy will depend on depth rather than breadth of reach to followers. The playing field is shifting in favor of smaller, more niche content creators, with new ways to monetize, like tokenized content and branded merchandise. The space also faces new opportunities from synthetic media such as virtual influencers.
The direction of the creator economy has clear implications for digital marketing and e-commerce leaders in the retail space, such as how they engage with audiences and where they allocate their marketing budget.
Below, we take a look at how tech companies are unbundling TikTok and the broader creator economy, broken out by how content is produced, distributed, and monetized.
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